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The Last Time America Rooted for Washington

After an uneven start, the Washington Nationals are finally starting to play like World Series contenders at the All-Star break. If they can pull it off, the Nats would be Washington’s first major league champions in 90 years. But back in 1924—unlike today—few expected that the Washington Senators could ever best the mightiest teams in baseball, the Yankees and Giants. And back then almost the entire country was pulling for the representatives of the nation’s capital—strange as that might sound today—to win it all.

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“In America’s mind-set, it ranked as one of the great improbables,” the late Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich reflected in a column in 1994, like putting “a man on the moon.”

The Senators hadn’t done anything to distinguish themselves before the 1924 season. The previous year, Washington had been a sub-.500, fourth-place team, finishing 23½ games behind the first-place New York Yankees, who went to win the World Series against the New York Giants. In 1920s America, baseball was the only professional team sport that mattered, with pro football and basketball yet to take off. But baseball’s showcase event, the World Series, had become a parochial affair: 1923 was the third straight New York-New York Fall Classic.

The Yankees featured a powerhouse lineup led by Babe Ruth, who hit .393 in 1923 with 41 home runs, and three starting pitchers who won at least 19 games. The Senators had shown some promise in 1923, featuring five .300 hitters. But only one starting pitcher, Walter Johnson, had a winning record—and at 35, in his 17th season, the Big Train appeared to be slowing down, posting a so-so .3.48 ERA, one of his worst ever. In his first 10 seasons, Johnson had only once had an ERA over 2.00, and never over 3.00.

Like this year’s Nats, led by rookie manager Matt Williams, the 1924 Senators went with an untested skipper. Team owner Clark Griffith decided to shake things up by naming his 27-year-old second baseman, Bucky Harris, player-manager, in hopes of finally bringing a pennant to Washington. Sportswriters panned the move as “Griffith’s Folly,” but the owner saw something in his new manager more important than experience: “I’ve been watching him for five years, and he’s a tiger … Full of the type of fighting spirit that makes for success on the ball field, I believe Harris will instill the same spirit into his teammates.”

Another player in the league with plenty of “fighting spirit” was Ty Cobb, arguably the best in baseball history, by then at the end of his career as 37-year-old player-manager of the Detroit Tigers. Cobb, a notoriously dirty player who relished baiting opponents, taunted Harris with names such as “baby face” and “snookums.”

Harris’s son, Stanley Harris, told me a story about Cobb spiking young Senators third baseman Ossie Bluege in a game that season, angering Bucky Harris.“After that, every time Cobb would come to second base, with a double play possibility, dad would try to hit him in the head with the ball, and Cobb would try to spike him,” Stanley Harris, now 86, recalled with a laugh.

There were no hard feelings on Cobb’s part—at least years later, when he reflected on his one-time adversary: “He was my kind of ballplayer and we always played hard against each other—hard but always with respect.”

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At the team’s spring training facility in Tampa, Florida, Griffith was one of the few people in baseball who predicted a successful year for the Senators: “Those boys are going to get somewhere this year.”

If the Senators— even then, their official name was the Nationals, and the two names were used interchangeably — were to upset the established order that season, it would be in tune with the times. The “Roaring 20s” was a decade of great cultural and political change, marked by Prohibition, speakeasies, the Charleston, jazz clubs and new-found freedom for many Americans who purchased cars for the first time. The decade began with women finally winning the right to vote.

President Calvin Coolidge preparing to throw out the ball for the opening game of the 1924 World Series between the Washington Senators and the New York Giants.

And Bucky Harris wasn’t the only young man entrusted with a lot of responsibility in 1924. That same year, J. Edgar Hoover, just 29, was named head of the FBI. Another man who had yet to reach his 30th birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald, began work on The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925.

It was also an era of exciting and legendary baseball players. In addition to Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb, the American League featured greats such as Tris Speaker, Al Simmons and Eddie Collins. In the National League, Rogers Hornsby hit .424 in 1924, and the pennant-winning Giants featured an astonishing six future Hall of Famer hitters: George Kelly, Frankie Frisch, Bill Terry, Travis Jackson, Ross Youngs and Hack Wilson.

Despite Griffith’s confidence in his new manager, after 50 games, the ’24 Senators were on pace for another ho-hum season, starting 24-26—nearly identical to this year’s Nats, who began 25-25. At roughly the one-third point of the season, the Senators sat in sixth place in the eight-team American League, 4½ games behind the first-place Yankees.

Then, as Babe Ruth would later recall in his autobiography, “Washington got hot quicker than almost any club I ever saw.” The Senators reeled off five straight wins, and then went to New York on June 23 to start a four-game series against the Yankees. Washington won all four to catapult into first place.

Eight thousand fans welcomed the team home upon its return to Union Station after the sweep. “Oh You Nationals!” the Washington Post exclaimed. “Washington fans for the first time in their lives will experience the thrill of seeing the home representatives take the field tomorrow afternoon as the official defender of first place.”

Frederic J. Frommer is a reporter for the Associated Press in Washington and the author of four books on baseball. This article is adapted from his 2013 book, You Gotta Have Heart: A History of Washington Baseball from 1859 to the 2012 National League East Champions. Follow him @ffrommer.